Vendor Views

Computerworld - The future is unfolding fast in the wireless industry. Computerworld spoke with five top vendors to get their opinions on where the market is heading and what advances IT managers can expect in the coming year.

Virtual roundtable participants:
Chris Bolinger, manager of partner marketing, Cisco Systems Inc.
Jim Johnson, vice president and general manager, wireless networking, Intel Corp.
John Roese, chief technology officer, Enterasys Networks Inc., Andover, Mass.
Ray Martino, vice president and general manager of the network products group, Symbol Technologies Inc., Holtsville, N.Y.
Lynn Lucas, director of solutions marketing, WLAN division, Proxim Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.

What does the client of the future look like? According to most estimates, 15% to 20% of notebook computers currently ship with wireless capabilities. That's expected to jump to 70% in the next several years, according to Intel's Johnson. While wireless technology poses battery problems for PDAs, "more and more, Wi-Fi technology is proliferating in everything," Enterasys' Roese says.
But wireless vendors are also focusing on cellular phones. "An upcoming capability is to have a cell phone work over a wireless LAN infrastructure," Proxim's Lucas says. "Today, you can operate handsets over the 802.11b infrastructure, but if I can operate the cell phone over the WLAN infrastructure, that's a significant cost savings."
Cisco sees "combo phones" emerging next year that would use traditional cellular service when outside and the WLAN infrastructure indoors. "It won't be until 2005 that they really take off, though," Cisco's Bolinger says.

Which wireless standard will take precedence in the next year? Vendors agree that 802.11b will prevail for the next year. Acceptance of 802.11a, they say, has been slow, mainly due to economics. Prices for 802.11b "are going through the floor," says Bolinger. Meanwhile, moving to 802.11a would require technology upgrades or replacements, and increasing the speed of current wireless applications probably isn't critical enough to justify the cost. "In the enterprise market, I'd say wait until 802.11a is more mature," says Symbol's Martino.
By the end of 2004, however, 802.11a will have its day, vendors say. "802.11a will start ramping in the second half of next year, and enterprise clients will start to do validations in the second half of the year," predicts Johnson. And 802.11g will make some gains, but not as much as 802.11a, because with the latter, you get more network capacity and channel density. "If you're trying to deploy media-rich, high-bandwidth wireless, 802.11a is clearly the right choice," says Roese.
Lucas is one dissenter. "We're seeing a leaning toward 802.11g, and that's